Did you ever have a meal so good you wanted to tell everyone about it? I had one recently and want to share the experience with you, but you won’t be hearing about a perfectly cooked piece of fish or an imaginative dessert.
No, instead, I want to share the spark that was ignited during our first interactive dinner, which we called Thought Accelerators: Future Fintech.
Think Mastermind and think-tank meets a great meal. The idea, deployed on an evening falling between two days of DNA Accredited Financial Advisor Training in Atlanta, was to bring together participants ranging from beginners to experts to discuss behavioral insight challenges and solutions.By bringing together individual perspectives across a diverse array of careers and experiences, we wanted to further activate what they had learned and do a bit of forecasting. I couldn’t have predicted the results, how powerfully this group would embrace its collective goal, nor the energizing interplay and takeaways.I had prepared three questions I hoped would provoke conversation, then began questioning whether to jettison a couple of those. I am glad I did not. Those questions and just one each of the responses follow.
What role do you think behavioral insights will play in shaping the future of financial services industries?
Help advisory clients/investors become more self-empowered: Behavioral insights give them the personal power to put them in control of themselves and therefore money. Rather than the energy of money in financial markets (and the system) controlling people, they can make sound decisions – about money and most anything else.In some senses that future is here; we must now put this power in the hands of more advisors and other professionals so they can, in turn, magnify the number of clients leveraging their own insights.
How do you think personalization will scale in the future? (Will we need human intervention to use personalization?)
Businesses must garner and analyze the right data points, even the granular ones, and make them actionable to close the intention-action gap if they want to truly achieve personalization. Ultimately, the insights must be so accurate and delivered in a user-friendly way that people see themselves in them and feel understood. Only the power of technology enables this more personalized experience be delivered on a scalable basis. Nevertheless, the tech must set up these deeper empirical inputs to be leveraged by humans or by further machine learning based tech, (perhaps) including AI.And scale must not supplant personalization; it must foster/enable it. The demand for personalization, up to and including anticipating someone’s needs, is growing and must be part of the equation, whether the insights are powering big data or smaller cohorts.It was clear that that the right data points to deliver the right adaptive experience in the future which will evolve through machine learning must include hard-wired behavioral insights and not just the typical demographic and transactional information that situationally changes.
How are you seeing personalization of financial services being done today? What do you anticipate will happen in the future?
So far, behavioral science has been used to get people enrolled en masse into a program (e.g. – a retirement solution) but not to change behavior – emphasis is on scale and not personalization. In the future, more accurate data points will be needed to power machine learning solutions, with more powerful humans finishing the conversation.What that means to me: Helping develop more personally empowered leaders and advisors (the best need to be better) to guide more highly evolved clients who have access to more powerful online information and solutions.
In conclusion, the observation came out that with technology things are changing every 5 years.
So, now innovators are looking to build their solution on what will be stable and around for 10 or more years. It was clear to everyone that DNA natural behavioral insights about a person have been scientifically proven to be around long-term. So, there is no reason why DNA Behavior cannot be the common language of a very powerful inter-connected ecosystem of specialized businesses providing apps and services.Ironically, this meal was so good, I was left wanting more. That’s how electric the evening and its conversations were. So, while the initial goal was that adding this think-tank component to an already-planned workshop would ensure attendees could immediately begin leveraging unique financial personality insights to further help clients achieve greater self-empowerment – and wealth accumulation the result is that we’ll be having more Future FinTech dinners.I can’t wait to see what great ideas, insights and collaborations are on the menu. If you’re interested in being part of one of these dynamic evenings, please just drop us a
line.
